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19 - A Habit Ontology for Cognitive and Social Sciences

Methodological Individualism, Pragmatist Interactionism, and 4E Cognition

from Part III - Socially Embeddded and Culturally Extended Habits

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 November 2020

By
Italo Testa
Edited by
Fausto Caruana  and
Italo Testa
Fausto Caruana
Affiliation:
Institute of Neuroscience (Parma), Italian National Research Council
Italo Testa
Affiliation:
Università degli Studi, Parma
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Summary

In this chapter I argue that a Pragmatist framework can offer us a common ontological framework for both social and cognitive sciences, which represents a promising alternative to both internalist and methodological and ontological individualist approaches to sociality. Accordingly, social interaction is constitutive of cognitive phenomena both at the subpersonal and at the personal level, and at the individual and at the collective level. I reconstruct this model as a form of motor social ontology based on the notion of habit and criticize in this light intentionalist takes on social cognition. Finally, I assess recent arguments in favor of the rediscovery of the notion of “habit” within cognitive sciences, and argue that habit ontology can play a foundational role in embodied cognitive sciences insofar as it can give a unified account of 4E cognition, that is of cognition understood as an embodied, enactive, embedded, and extended phenomenon.

Keywords

social ontologycollective intentionalitysocial sciencesindividualismpragmatism
Type
Chapter
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Habits
Pragmatist Approaches from Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Social Theory
 , pp. 395 - 416
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2020

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